Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Fun with 2D Shapes

I hope everyone is staying healthy out there. I had THREE kids out today with the flu...that means I only had NINE kids ALL DAY! I want my sweeties to feel better but I'll admit it was nice to have such a small group today!

Yesterday we've been reviewing 2D shapes before we move onto 3D next week. Today we went on a "shape hunt" throughout our classroom and hallway. We wanted to hunt outside and out at the playground but it has STORMED here all day so we had to stay inside. They were so EXCITED to hunt for circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, pentagons, octagons and so much more! I had all NINE kids raising their hand! It was fabulous! I didn't get to take very many exciting pictures of this but it was fun! Here they are pointing out shapes on a huge poster in our hallway. Most days I have to ask them not to touch it but today I didn't mind!

Due to the weather, our shape hunt was cut short so I needed about a 20 minute filler. Now, I usually do good at coming up with fillers for a few minutes but 20 minutes, I was worried about what we were going to do. Then something I had seen on pinterest (big surprise) and decided to give it a try. Let's make shapes out of popsicle sticks!!!

Now, I didn't have time to color my popsicle sticks and label them since I came up with this all in the matter of 2 minutes. I have each student 12 sticks (we are learning shapes up to 12 sides/vertices...a dodecagon). I called a shape such as a heptagon (7 sides) and they had to make it using their sticks! The loved it! Then I came up with the idea to put magnets on the back of my set, so I could make the shape and display it on our whiteboard. I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with this but I was so proud of myself! I'm going to make a magnet popsicle set to use during centers! Here's my version of our popsicle shapes!

Here's my magnetic sticks that I was so proud of!

On a different note, I'm so excited to announce that I'm reached ONE HUNDRED followers at my TPT Store and my little blog is getting close too! I need to do something to celebrate!!! What should I do? A giveaway...but what kind?!? I definitely have some thinking to do! A big thanks go all my followers out there!